4. The MacBook Air

As you might expect, Steve Jobs kept Apple’s most impressive new piece of hardware for last: The MacBook Air. It’s a super slim, metallic notebook with a 13” screen, full size keyboard, LED based display, and optional solid state hard disk drive. Sounds a bit - actually a lot - like the notebook we predicted just last week.

To demonstrate just how slim the Macbook Air is, Jobs successfully slid it into a standard sized manila office envelope. It’s only 0.16 inches thick (or thin) at its thinnest point, and 0.76 inches at its thickest point. The MacBook Air also comes with a built in iSight video conferencing camera, and a trackpad so intelligent that it can understand not only clicks, but pinching, rotating, and swiping movements (for example, you can rotate a picture by holding down your thumb, and rotating your index finger around it on the trackpad).

The laptop ships with an impressive 2 GB of RAM (Apple’s first to do so), a standard 80 GB, 1.8 inch hard drive, with an option for a 64 GB solid state drive. Although the solid state drive has a smaller capacity, it will operate in complete silence, and have no moving parts to wear out and break.

Apple needed a thinner than usual mobile processor for the MacBook Air, so they asked hardware partner Intel to build one. Intel succeeded, coming up with a 60% smaller 1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, complete with of 4MB of L2 cache.

The MacBook Air will start shipping in 2 weeks, and will be available at a starting price of $1,799. Yes, it’s pricey, but it’s also impressive. And, at just 3 pounds, you’ll save a little on the shipping charge.

More Coverage

The Macworld keynote closed on an interesting note with Academy Award winner Randy Newman performing on a black baby grand. Macworld coverage continues throughout the week on TomsGuide.com.